Why Computer Science Students Cheat

alphadogg writes "Enrollment in undergraduate computer science courses is at an all-time high at colleges nationwide. But this trend that's been hailed by the US tech industry has a dark side: a disproportionate number of students taking these courses are caught cheating. More students are caught cheating in introductory computer science courses than in any other course on campus, thanks to automated tools that professors use to detect unauthorized code reuse, excessive collaboration, and other forbidden ways of completing homework assignments. Computer science professors say their students are not more dishonest than students in other fields; they're just more likely to get caught because software is available to check for plagiarism. 'The truth is that on every campus, a large proportion of the reported cases of academic dishonesty come from introductory computer science courses, and the reason is totally obvious: we use automated tools to detect plagiarism,' explains Professor Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. 'We compare against other student submissions, and we compare against previous student submissions and against code that may be on the Web. These tools flag suspicious cases, which are then manually examined.'"

Re:Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

So it was write your own damn code and get off my lawn!

Fix'd.

My opinion:

[butterflysrage]

Enrollment in undergraduate computer science courses is at an all-time high at colleges nationwide. But this trend that's been hailed by the US tech industry has a dark side: a disproportionate number of students taking these courses are caught cheating [networkworld.com]. More students are caught cheating in introductory computer science courses than in any other course on campus, thanks to automated tools that professors use to detect unauthorized code reuse, excessive collaboration and other forbidden ways of completing homework assignments. Computer science professors say their students are not more dishonest than students in other fields; they're just more likely to get caught because software is available to check for plagiarism. 'The truth is that on every campus, a large proportion of the reported cases of academic dishonesty come from introductory computer science courses, and the reason is totally obvious: we use automated tools to detect plagiarism,' explains Professor Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. 'We compare against other student submissions, and we compare against previous student submissions and against code that may be on the Web. These tools flag suspicious cases, which are then manually examined.'"

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[fucket]

for (indexnt index=1;index=10;index++) { System.out.prindexntln(index); }

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[VGPowerlord]

System.out.prindexntln

I laughed when I saw this.

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Normal Dan]

I have a similar question,
If someone asked me to (in Java say) print the numbers from 1 to 10, I would probably do something like

for (int i=1;i=10;i++) {
System.out.println(i);
}

So would most other people. Would this flag me as a cheater?

Some cheaters get caught the old fashioned way...

[Anonymous Coward]

Me and a friend had taken a class on operating systems and gotten very good grades in it, especially the project, so we were invited to become graders for next semester. We accepted.

So one night we're grading a project, and my friend comes over and asks me "Hey, doesn't this look a bit familiar?".
Turns out a group had managed to get their hands on OUR code (it was a group of 5, and now we know who probably leaked it out) and plagarized it line for line. I am not sure if that class had automated plagarization checking, but if not, only we would have caught this since, well, we wrote that code.

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Anonymous Coward]

But we didn't wirk togehter you isnensitive cold!

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Mike Buddha]

If someone asked me to (in Java say) print the numbers from 1 to 10, I would probably do something like

for (int i=1;i=10;i++) {

    System.out.println(i);
}

So would most other people. Would this flag me as a cheater?

No, the system would flag you as being wrong. "i=10" would give an error either in compile time in a strongly typed language, or in runtime in a loosely typed one. FAIL.

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[natehoy]

But we didn't wirk togehter you isnensitive cold!!

Why NetworkWorld cheats

[PwnSnake]

I've seen this exact same article, at least parts of it word-for-word, around before... no joke.

Re:What is the sound of one hand coding?

[noidentity]

You must be one of those hippie coders who never trims his hair. In the real world, we always avoid using outside code or libraries. Only code we've written passes our quality standards. These schools are right to teach students that collaboration and reuse are cheating, because they are! Now excuse me, a customer has found yet another bug in our software today, so I need to see if I can fix it.

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[MartinSchou]

Actually, if you are particularly evil, and you happen to know that the person you're cheating off of hasn't used any kind of repository, just introduce some tricky bugs that keep the program from running properly.

The kind of bugs that you'd fix if you wanted the program to look like your own.

That way you get your okay grade, and the guy you cheated off of gets booted for cheating off of you. After all - if you are willing to steal their work, why not kill their career as well?

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Khisanth Magus]

One of the more amusing moments of my time as a Graduate Teaching Assistant was when I caught 3 students working together in a class where no collaboration was allowed. The sad thing is that in this particular class, there was only one correct way of doing the assignments, so anyone who did it correctly could not be caught. These three had such a horribly wrong answer that there was no way that 3 independent people could have gotten that answer.

Re:How does a 'caught' student defend himself?

[blair1q]

You want to speak to the Law School.

In CS, we just throw exceptions. If someone has written an intelligent handler, fine. If not, there's always a default.

Re:Why Computer Science Students Cheat?

[tool462]

I like that you (correctly) left Physics students off that list.
Physics students don't cheat. Their wave functions become entangled, so when you solve for the eigenvalue of one, the other is necessarily solved as well.

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Asclepius99]

But we didn't wirk togehter you isnensitive cold!!

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[Anonymous Coward]

But we didn't wirk togehter you isnensitive cold!!!

Re:How many ways are there to do simple things?

[TheRaven64]

I'd have given some points if the code had been any Algol-family language. Hell, I'd probably have given some if they'd given me a solution in Smalltalk or Lisp, but not very many. This just looked like they'd copied random words and symbols from the board, without any understanding of where they went. Come to think of it, maybe it was valid Perl...